Trace,failure and testing equivalences for communicating processes

A basic question in the theory of communicating processes is “When should two processes be considered equivalent?”. Attempts to answer this question have led to the concepts of observation equivalence, bisimulations, testing equivalence, failure equivalence, etc. The main point of this paper is to increase the understanding and motivation for two of these equivalences, namely failure and testing equivalences. The approach starts with the idea that the equivalence of processes should be reducible to the visible sequences of actions which a process performs in various contexts. This idea is implemented by a string-based semantic order for communicating processes where divergence is catastrophic. Under some assumptions about contexts, the resulting semantics is shown to be equivalent to theimproved failure semantics of Brookes and Roscoe⁽¹⁾ and also to themust testing-semantics of Hennessy and DeNicola.^(2–4) This characterization gives independent support for the appropriateness of failures and testing.     

Distribution of diethylstilboestrol in pigs

The synthetic growth promoter diethylstilboestrol (DES) administered orally to pigs can be detected by radioimmunoassay (RIA) analysis of kidney, liver, faeces, bile and urine from animals fed continuously to slaughter, but not in muscle, fat or plasma. If treated animals are fed on material not containing DES for 72 h prior to slaughter, then the levels of parent compound and metabolite in all products decrease to become not significantly greater than those in control animals. The gross metabolism of DES in pigs and bovines appears to be similar.     

An empirical investigation of socio-cultural factors of information sharing in China

Understanding information sharing is an important challenge to modern organizations, and is likely to be increasingly considered when IT investment decisions are made world-wide. Our research study investigated the influence of cultural factors on information sharing in China. It was postulated that social network structures such as guanxi, Confucian dynamism, and collectivism could explain the degree to which information sharing took place between people in China. It was found that guanxi, Confucian dynamism, and collectivism all had a significant influence on information sharing.     

Information Visualization Within a Digital Video Library

The Informedia Digital Video Library contains over a thousand hours of video, consuming over a terabyte of disk space. This paper summarizes the multimedia abstractions used to represent this video in prior systems and introduces the visualization techniques employed to browse and navigate multiple video documents at once.     

Mathematical and Scientific Foundations for an Integrative Engineering Curriculum

All fields of engineering, whether chemical, civil, electrical, materials, mechanical, etc., encompass a common body of essential mathematics and science. In the freshman year of Drexels E⁴ program, this common mathematical and scientific foundation is cultivated in the Mathematical and Scientific Foundations of Engineering I, II and III (MSFE I, MSFE II, MSFE III). In an integrated fashion, MSFE I presents the essential calculus, physics and engineering mechanics vital to the freshman engineering student. In the first two quarters, MSFE II presents chemistry with clearly defined engineering applications and significance: in the third quarter, MSFE II presents living systems with the same thrust. Also in the third quarter, MSFE III presents basic circuits and circuit elements, and a brief introduction to electromagnetic theory.     

Chronic renal disease: new therapies to delay kidney replacement

Several factors promote the progression of renal disease, including glomerular hypertension and hypertrophy, molecular factors such as cytokines and growth hormones, proteinuria, acidosis, and hyperlipidemia. Regardless of the underlying etiology, many patients with chronic renal insufficiency will ultimately require kidney replacement therapy. Your goal is to delay the progression of renal failure, mainly through aggressive control of blood pressure. Other possible interventions include protein restriction, bicarbonate therapy, and lipid-lowering drugs.     

Automated zebrafish chorion removal and single embryo placement: optimizing throughput of zebrafish developmental toxicity screens

The potential of the developing zebrafish model for toxicology and drug discovery is limited by inefficient approaches to manipulating and chemically exposing zebrafish embryos-namely, manual placement of embryos into 96- or 384-well plates and exposure of embryos while still in the chorion, a barrier of poorly characterized permeability enclosing the developing embryo. We report the automated dechorionation of 1600 embryos at once at 4 h postfertilization (hpf) and placement of the dechorionated embryos into 96-well plates for exposure by 6 hpf. The process removed ≥95% of the embryos from their chorions with 2% embryo mortality by 24 hpf, and 2% of the embryos malformed at 120 hpf. The robotic embryo placement allocated 6-hpf embryos to 94.7% ± 4.2% of the wells in multiple 96-well trials. The rate of embryo mortality was 2.8% (43 of 1536) from robotic handling, the rate of missed wells was 1.2% (18 of 1536), and the frequency of multipicks was <0.1%. Embryo malformations observed at 24 hpf occurred nearly twice as frequently from robotic handling (16 of 864; 1.9%) as from manual pipetting (9 of 864; 1%). There was no statistical difference between the success of performing the embryo placement robotically or manually.     

Integration of data systems and technology improves research and collaboration for a superfund research center

Large collaborative centers are a common model for accomplishing integrated environmental health research. These centers often include various types of scientific domains (e.g., chemistry, biology, bioinformatics) that are integrated to solve some of the nation's key economic or public health concerns. The Superfund Research Center (SRP) at Oregon State University (OSU) is one such center established in 2008 to study the emerging health risks of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons while using new technologies both in the field and laboratory. With outside collaboration at remote institutions, success for the center as a whole depends on the ability to effectively integrate data across all research projects and support cores. Therefore, the OSU SRP center developed a system that integrates environmental monitoring data with analytical chemistry data and downstream bioinformatics and statistics to enable complete "source-to-outcome" data modeling and information management. This article describes the development of this integrated information management system that includes commercial software for operational laboratory management and sample management in addition to open-source custom-built software for bioinformatics and experimental data management.     

Demonstration of Sustainable Development of Groundwater through Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR)

Water Resources Management - Sustained pumping of groundwater can lead to declining water levels in wellfields and concerns regarding the sustainability of groundwater resources. Aquifer Storage...     

Bonding to aged surfaces: A thermally-aged epoxy

It is common experience that aged surfaces are often difficult to bond to. We report an examination of bonding to thermally-aged epoxy surfaces, using as the adhesive the same epoxy as that of the aged surface. The cured and postcured epoxy was aged at 200 ° C, with the ageing time varying from 2 to 8 h. The fracture energy of the bond line was measured by mode I cleavage under conditions of relatively slow crack growth. The bondline fracture energy was found to decrease logarithmically with ageing time. The fracture energies for bonds to surfaces aged for 2, 4, and 8 h at 200 ° C were 0.077, 0.059, and 0.050 kJ M^–2, respectively. These compare to 0.13 kJ M^–2 for a bond to an unaged surface and 0.21 kJ m^–2 for bulk fracture. Fracture surfaces resulting from both slow and rapid fracture were examined by optical and scanning electron microscopy. Fracture features different from those arising from bulk fracture were found. Areas with good adhesion occurred amidst fields of featureless fracture surface; the frequency and size of these areas decreased with increased ageing time. Evidence of plastic deformation was found, always occurring on the new side of the bond: ridges parallel with crack propagation at high crack speeds and subsurface undulations perpendicular to crack propagation at low speeds. The bond has the effect of channelling the crack along the bondline, but fracture does not always remain exactly at the interface. Fracture often occurred a relatively constant distance away from the interface, suggesting that the presence of the interface was felt for some distance.